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David S. Kechley Professor of Music, Emeritus

So revolutionary has been the effect on the music department of your many years’ service as chairman, that students once affectionately posted a Mao-like portrait of you at the entrance to Bernhard. Under your benevolent leadership, the department broadened its curriculum to embrace new cultures and raised dramatically the scope and the level of student and faculty performance. Through some one hundred and twenty-five events yearly, music now fills this campus like that of no other liberal arts college. Your masses of followers include the many students who, trained by your instruction and inspired by your example, have gone on to careers in composition. Your own musical creations, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and by a Guggenheim Fellowship, have won ASCAP Awards almost annually and have been performed around the world. The titles of these works show the great range of your imagination, from “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” to “The Funky Chicken for String Quartet.” May emeritus status now afford you more time to contemplate “Soft Refrains and Gentle Whispers.”

I hereby declare you Professor of Music, Emeritus, entitled to all the rights, honors, and privileges appertaining thereto.